Distributional, biological and nomenclatural notes are presented for 113 species of Buprestidae from the U.S. and Canada in the following 29 genera and subgenera: Acmaeodera (s. str.) Eschscholtz 1829, Acmaeoderopsis Barr 1974, Actenodes Dejean 1833, Agaeocera Saunders 1871, Agrilaxia Kerremans 1903, Agrilus (s. str.) Curtis 1825, Anthaxia (Haplanthaxia) Reitter 1911, Anthaxia (Melanthaxia) Richter 1949, Aphanisticus Latreille 1829, Brachys Dejean 1833, Buprestis (s. str.) Linnaeus 1758, Buprestis (Cypriacis) Casey 1909, Buprestis (Knulliobuprestis) Kurosawa 1988, Buprestis (Stereosa) Casey 1909, Chalcophora Dejean 1833, Chrysobothris (s. str.) Eschscholtz 1829, Dicerca (s. str.) Eschscholtz 1829, Hesperorhipis Fall 1920, Mastogenius Solier 1849, Pachyschelus Solier 1833, Paratyndaris (s. str.) Fisher 1919, Paratyndaris (Knulliella) Cobos 1980, Phaenops Dejean 1833, Polycesta (s. str.) Dejean 1833, Polycesta (Arizonica) Cobos 1981, Spectralia Casey 1909, Taphrocerus (s. str.) Solier 1833 and Xenorhipis LeConte 1866. Records include one new record for Canada, 65 new U.S. state records, 52 new larval hosts, 34 new adult hosts and 31 new flower associations. Comments on and corrections to previous literature records for other species are also made, and Agrilus neoprosopidus Knull 1938 is confirmed as a correct original spelling.

The genus Litocladius Mendes, Andersen & Sæther 2004 is recorded from Oriental China for the first time. The adult male of Litocladius liangae sp. nov. is described and illustrated. A key to adult males of the genus worldwide is presented.

Species of the genus Pneustocerus Horváth 1905 from China are treated: P. gravelyi (Distant 1911) and P. stusaki sp. nov. Photographs of the head and thorax, illustrations of male genital capsules and parameres of the two species, and a key to known species of this genus are provided.

A rearing chamber designed for extended field rearing of caddisflies was used successfully during the summers of 2011 and 2012. Species belonging to seven caddisfly families were reared successfully. Rearing techniques, chamber construction and operation is discussed. Lessons learned and results are presented. The design of this rearing chamber enabled the first association of the larva and pupa of Ecclisomyia bilera and Oligophlebodes sierra.

Tunon gen. nov., a new genus of Protelaterini from southern Chile is here described and illustrated with one species Tunon guinezi sp. nov. Its relationships with other members of the Protelaterini such as the Chilean genera Anaspasis Candèze 1881 and Valdivelater Lawrence & Arias 2009 are discussed.

The pupal case of the Nearctic robber fly, Diogmites contortus Bromley 1936, is described, illustrated, and compared with the pupal cases of three other Nearctic species, D. discolor Loew 1866, D. misellus (Loew 1866), and D. neoternatus (Bromley 1931). A key is provided to the pupal cases of these species. The main characteristics of the D. contortus pupal case are, (1) abdominal segment 1 with dorsal transverse row of 30 spurs, (2) abdominal segments 5–7 with uninterrupted ventral row of 41–47 bristle-like spines, and (3) abdominal segment 8 with 8 lateral bristle-like spines on each side.

This paper proposes a Lepidoptera insect image recognition method based on extracting image features using superpixels segmentation, encoding the features with Locality-constrained Linear Coding (LLC), aggregating codes with max pooling, and then classifying them with classification and regression tree (CART). This method used the natural scale color patterns on the insect wings as the basis for recognition, which can avoid the complicated chemical processing needed for venation based recognition. The method is tested in a dataset including 579 image samples from ten species of Lepidoptera species, and the recognition error rate is below 5%. The method also exhibits good performance with respect to time cost. The experimental results suggest that on the task of recognizing Lepidoptera species, the proposed method has state-of-the-art performance with high efficiency.